Privacy@Lemmy.ml: Could websites and data brokers track you with your profile pictures?

I think about that sort of thing every time I upload any image at all, just out of inherent paranoia. A profile pic would most likely be one of the first things people check if for some reason they wanted to find other accounts you might have.

I don't think "data brokers" are quite at the level of sophistication where they're automatically doing that to everyone, but with AI they'll probably get there soon.

As someone else said, Pixel for Pixel analysis is probably too much compute time for them to bother. But they can do a quick checksum on the file, and they probably do.

Whether the image seriously affects your online fingerprint is mostly about whether a lot of users or only a few users use that exact profile picture.

If they few users have that exact profile picture, then it's likely that they have a behavior tracking data set assigned to it, in case it's valuable later.

It's not that someone is sitting in a room correlating and judging your choice of picture. It's just that every aspect of your web browsing that can be cheaply tracked and correlated is tracked and correlated.

An image that too many people use is likely also correlated, but won't be heavily weighted in deciding that traffic is yours, because the error rate is too high.

That's why I always set my profile image to "Mickey Mouse" while I listen to music by The Beatles. It makes me invisible. Also I just really like Mickey Mouse.

I don't think they use picture analyzing software for tracking. It's very resource heavy because it uses systems similar to LLMs. You can make very slight changes to your pfp (just one changed pixel is enough) for every website to avoid hash match but it's not necessary I think. If someone wants to manually find your accounts though then it won't be too hard for them.

Yes, of course they could. Generating an image fingerprint is not all that computationally expensive by today's standards.

Is it unique enough to track you? It doesn't have to be, since online tracking generally keys off of a set of data, rather than a single item. But just for the sake of argument, consider that services like tineye and google images have pretty good success at matching images even with no additional data.

Is it (or will it eventually be) worthwhile for data collectors? You would have to ask them.

If it's not widely used, and your usernames are similar, anyone could make a reasonable guess that you are the same person.

As far as the paranoia around, say, Amazon being able tonsource that info from other sites for their advertising purposes, it doesn't work that way.

Yes but the real risk there is likely from individuals trying to dox you who can notice the obvious pattern and put 2 and 2 together to link things and build a profile.

So what to do when choosing a profile Pic? Is AI generated an option?